Quote:
Originally Posted by SecretMaster
I always find it interesting that the religious always sit there and exclaim "but they are hypothesis! you cannot prove them and thus you are wrong!" meanwhile their explanation has done so very little to contribute to the realm of knowledge, and quite frankly their explanation is much more unproven and unsubstantiated than what current science has to offer.
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Let me add my two cents here, as this is an area I've done some research in. There is one conclusion that stands out: science is logically incapable of proving anything in the domain of the unobservable (ie. with indirect evidence). Evolution itself has some fairly observable results (which have been verified as far as I know) but the method itself is unobservable. Now, when we apply evolution to the past, and even millions of years into the past, we come into a realm of the 'double' unobservable, since we have not been millions of years into the past. So: to say that science has proven anything of the kind 'evolution has been proven to be the truth' is to err, not only as an atheist but also as a scientist.
That said, religious arguments usually fail to acknowledge the fact that these kind of theoretical constructions are in fact very useful, as well as beautifully constructed, which is to say that it
might be true. After all, as we weren't there at creation, we don't know what the mechanisms of it really are. These arguments should also acknowledge, as you rightly point out, that they do not have the goal to provide a
scientific alternative. Evolution is accepted because it adheres to certain (admittedly vague) scientific values, while creationism hasn't been found to adhere to them (perhaps a better constructed version could). Thus, evolution does provide a certain type of knowledge (a theoretical framework to explain observable phenomena) which creationism does not (it uses premises to support a premise).
So, in conclusion: both parties of the eternal debate should realise that in truth they really don't, and in fact
cannot know what is 'the truth' in these matters.